> hardware differentiated by software such that said hardware can be sold with a margin much greater than nominal competitors running a commodity operating system.
Apple's hardware is not differentiated by software. Their creaking software is an ancillary requirement to use their excellent hardware. If their software was their differentiator then Hackintosh's would be more widely used. Secondly, OSX is a commodity operating system. Non-commodity operating systems would be things like VOS.
> The functionality is mostly the same, and if users value a sustainable advantage in the user experience Apple deserves the profits — and power — that follow.
Sorry to be a dickhead but you shouldn't throw terms like "sustainable advantage" around like they're literal terms, when they have a very precise meaning in literature and research going back nearly half a century. Sustained Advantage specifically relates to Corporate Strategy and industry competition and is completely unrelated to user experience and whether or not a company "deserves" profits; advantage in an industry implies value accrual regardless of whether it's deserved or not. Nice UX might arise from functional level strategies, which arise from business level strategies, but otherwise they're unrelated concepts and it's not something the user should be aware of.
Misuse of terms leads to them being confusing and meaningless (e.g. Disruption).
While you may find it creaking, myself and many other people find the experience of using Apple software far better than any competing systems. I wouldn't work somewhere that asked me to use Windows. For me, and maybe I'm overly aesthetically sensitive, it would make my day to day life much worse. This is just to say that the authority with which you dismiss Apple's software as a point of differentiation is probably misplaced.
> While you may find it creaking, myself and many other people find the experience of using Apple software far better than any competing systems. I wouldn't work somewhere that asked me to use Windows. For me, and maybe I'm overly aesthetically sensitive, it would make my day to day life much worse.
I agree: Windows is just embarrassingly bad. Fortunately, there is another …
I've been using desktop Linux for almost twenty years, and it is in my experience superior to the Mac. It gets out of my way and lets me get my work done. It has multiple tiling window managers. It is the native environment for the best tools. It is truly free, both in terms of liberty and price. It runs on commodity hardware. It's fast. And, IMHO, it can be pretty too.
Differentiation also has a precise meaning in literature, and just feeling that software which comes free with Apple hardware is better than other software doesn't indicate product differentiation or a differentiation strategy. That's just personal preference.
I'm not saying that you don't/shouldn't genuinely and rightly prefer Apple software, I use Apple devices every day myself. That being said, I'd hazard a guess that you wouldn't use OSX on a Dell as your primary machine? Or iOS on a cheap Android if that were possible?
Yea, you don't understand the definition of product differentiation or differentiation strategy, because iOS and MacOS are poster children for both.
You also don't understand that MacOS isn't designed to be a commodity OS that runs on any hardware. It doesn't install with a huge database of video drivers for every possible PC out there. Running MacOS on generic hardware is problematic and not worthwhile, especially when the vast majority of Mac users can get good Mac hardware for less than a fraction of 1% of their billable rate.
Yeah, I understand exactly what the definitions of them are in detail, and somebody saying "It's differentiated because I like it better", which is what the person I replied to wrote, doesn't fit under the definitions.
I never said that attributes of Apple's product lines can't be classed as 'differentiated'.
By your logic, if Windows was a good enough OS to be a differentiator, everyone would just build their own PCs to save a hundred bucks. Because everyone has the free time, inclination, and skills to build one, and everyone enjoys tinkering with their PCs when they don't run right, instead of actually getting work done.
No it'd be more like "if Windows was a good enough OS, people would go to efforts to install it on computers that aren't made for it" (Bootcamp?).
But either way, neither OSX or Windows are "differentiators". Attributes might differentiate the products in a theoretical sense, for example branding, pricing, licensing, support, ease of use, but there's effectively only 3 widely used operating systems so it's senseless to talk about differentiation as a concept. With that low level of competition you're just talking about 'different'.
Redhat is an example of an OS that you could call 'differentiated' due to their business model and niche usage.
If you don't understand how massively differentiated operating systems are in terms of features, you simply don't understand the concept of differentiation.
For example, the number of applications an OS can run is an incredibly important and valuable feature. How well it runs those applications is also an important and valuable feature. There is a reason why Excel users usually pick Windows, and Photoshop users often pick MacOS.
So Redhat. How well does it run Excel and Photoshop?
How exactly did Apple and Microsoft create a product which they knew ahead of time would attract specific software developers? Or are you suggesting that third party suppliers turned Microsoft/Apple's offerings into differentiated products over time?
And Redhat, one of the main software offerings of a 2 billion dollar public company, can't run the software that 98% of computers can, but they aren't an example of differentiation? It sounds like you don't understand differentiation and are using the term literally, as if it just means 'different'.
Apple's developer program for the Mac started pretty much at launch. They gave out free software, documentation, and equipment to some, and substantial discounts to others. They recruited MSFT from the start.
MSFT's developer arm has always been central to providing tools and support to developers wanting to build applications for it's operating systems.
You don't think both companies realized that an operating system with many available applications was far more valuable than one without?
Apple's hardware is not differentiated by software. Their creaking software is an ancillary requirement to use their excellent hardware. If their software was their differentiator then Hackintosh's would be more widely used. Secondly, OSX is a commodity operating system. Non-commodity operating systems would be things like VOS.
> The functionality is mostly the same, and if users value a sustainable advantage in the user experience Apple deserves the profits — and power — that follow.
Sorry to be a dickhead but you shouldn't throw terms like "sustainable advantage" around like they're literal terms, when they have a very precise meaning in literature and research going back nearly half a century. Sustained Advantage specifically relates to Corporate Strategy and industry competition and is completely unrelated to user experience and whether or not a company "deserves" profits; advantage in an industry implies value accrual regardless of whether it's deserved or not. Nice UX might arise from functional level strategies, which arise from business level strategies, but otherwise they're unrelated concepts and it's not something the user should be aware of.
Misuse of terms leads to them being confusing and meaningless (e.g. Disruption).